Distimo: Android Market could eclipse App Store in 5 months

updated 07:00 pm EDT, Wed April 27, 2011

by MacNN Staff

Distimo sees Android app count past iOS in 2011

Android Market is growing quickly enough that it could have a larger app count than the iOS App Store in five months, Distimo estimated in its April update. Researchers believed Google's store had swelled 16 percent in March to hit 206,143 active apps where Apple's shop, though larger, had grown just six percent to 333,214 active titles. The gap could close to 40,000 apps by the end of June and close entirely by July.

Few explanations were given for the changeover apart from developers no longer being single-platform. About 58 percent of the top fifty developers writing just for the iPad were already writing for at least one non-Apple mobile OS. Android's position at 37 percent of US smartphone share likely also played a part by encouraging support for a now larger platform. The proportion of paid apps was far lower on Android, however, suggesting fewer were making money directly from their apps.

RIM was engineering its own small coup, as BlackBerry App World was likely to be larger than Nokia's Ovi Store by late May.

The predictions were potentially called into question by official figures from both Apple and Google. The App Store officially passed 350,000 active apps months earlier and, based on companion checks by 148Apps, should have over 373,300 apps active as of this writing. Google has also remained conspicuously silent on Android's app count after the 120,000 figure and may have significantly less than Distimo's estimate without any follow-up figures.

Distimo also acknowledged that growth rates could change from month to month and that the rate wasn't necessarily steady.

So when the app store is ahead, Apple fanbois argue they have more "apps". When they no longer have that argument, they will try revenue. Then once that's no longer true, it'll be LOL we got a white iPhone.

So is the number of available apps the measure of a platform's excellence and reliability? In that case, Windows is definitely superior to Linux and OS X. And McDonald's makes the best hamburger on earth. And Toyota is a better car maker than Ferrari. And "American Idol" is the best TV show in the world. And soccer kicks the c*** out of baseball and (American) football. And Justin Bieber is a better singer than Aretha Franklin. And Jose Cuervo makes a better tequila than Petron. And . . . and . . . and . . .

I'll take iOS and its app count ANY day over the derivative (not to mention STOLEN) OS that is Android. Eric Schmidt and his "do no evil" crew are all yours, wrenchy/facebook_Clarence. You deserve each other. (By the by, welcome to all the malware that is attendant upon the 'Droid OS. According to today's press it's even worse than that for Windoze PC's! Happy days for you all 'round!)

I'd say the relative number of paid apps is a better measure, and anything that can take the tens of thousands of shovelware items like screen backgrounds and icon sets out of the figure will give us a better picture of the relative amount of actually appealing software that users care about.

Besides, Android users will most likely see no difference in performance to iPhone's since all the computer cycles the iOS tracking consumes will be used by up by must have anti-virus and anti- malware apps!

Every POS manufacturer is shipping phones that barely fall into the Smartphone category with free Android OS in return for Advertising in your face. Plus crappy apps and crappy hardware. I guess no matter how you cut it, there are more people willing to have c*** for free than pay for quality products.

If you look closely at the labels of all of their graphs they have chopped up the iOS App store totals into separate iPhone and iPad categories and are comparing them separately against Android.

Considering that a very large percentage of iPad apps are universal meaning they work on iPhones and iPod touches as well as iPads, this separation makes absolutely no sense whatsoever - unless you are trying to artificially boost Android and get some sensationalist headlines.

If you count all iOS apps together, you find that the current number is about 430,000 (using DIstimo's figures) and come July will = 475,000 which works out about 45% greater than Android at that time.

This also puts the number of free apps in the iOS App store significantly above the number of free apps in Android.

While Google allows anyone to post any spamware, broken bit of code or "hello world" app, the total number of apps in the Android marketplace is completely meaningless. An estimated 45% of apps in the Marketplace are spam apps and iOS boasts well over 300 top tier games from the premiere game publishers ID, EA, Gameloft, Popcap, ngmoco, Pangea while Android has between 20-30 for example.

The number of apps in the Amazon Appstore will be a much more useful comparison once that gets established thanks to Amazon ensuring that the chaff is weeded out.

However, far better metrics for the comparison of app stores is app download numbers, paid app income and advertising income which actually measure the real numerical and financial wealth and health of each ecosystem.

By those measures, iOS leads Android by an absolutely enormous amount:

*App Store Revenue 2009 - 2010* (source: IHS ScreenDigest):
- iOS App Store grew from $769 million to $1.782 billion = $1.013 billion increase
- Android Marketplace grew from $11 million to $102 million = $91 million increase
So annual Android developer income is a meagre 6% of iOS with an annual rate of increase only 9% as large as iOS. The gap between the two is 1,000% and getting far larger every year.
- Apple captured 82% of the revenue from all app stores in 2010 compared to 5% for Android

Now you may think that Android developers are instead making their money with advertising, but that is not the case:

- 71% of all app downloads were to iOS devices in 2010 according to ABI Research
- iOS users are worth up to twice as much as Android to advertisers according to Mobclix
- Millennium reports iOS captured 45% advertising income marketshare vs 38% share for Android in March 2011
- Net Applications reports iOS captured 3.3x the web browser share of Android in March 2011

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